Wednesday, April 27, 2016

It’s no secret that us English-speakers
think very highly of ourselves. What’s less obvious is how that pomposity affects
the dissemination of media. According to Words
Without Borders, “50 percent of all the books in translation now published
worldwide are translated from
English, but only 6 percent are translated into
English” (Schnee, Mason, and Felman, xi). I could not locate an updated
statistic, but the prevailing sentiment holds that we think we’re BFDs, and
we’re missing out on a wealth of literature as a result.

Words without Borders (WWB)is a magazine that bridges the gap by translating and publishing international
literature. Words Without Borders: The
World through the Eyes of Writers* is a particularly innovative anthology
published by the organization in 2007. WWB
asked 28 esteemed authors to choose their favorite short story or poem that had
not seen the English light of day. Their choices were translated from a wide
array of languages: Arabic, Chinese, Italian, and Spanish, to name a few.

I couldn’t help but agree with
author Ariel Dorman, who felt disturbed that many stories remain “shipwrecked
and without a translator” (Schnee, Mason, and Felman, 344). Nowadays, we are so
bogged down by the politics of physical borders that we narrow-mindedly focus
on one goal: what is pragmatic? I’m not saying throw rationality by the
wayside, but wouldn’t it be more prudent to understand the cultures that we’re
turning into numbers? To expand our perspective through knowledge and empathy?
Literature is a resource in that regard. What better way to learn about a
different world that to hear from someone immersed in it?

As you might expect in an
anthology, some stories are better than others. One of my favorites is
“Revulsion” originally written in Spanish by Horacio Castellanos Moya. It is
the El Salvadorian version of The Catcher in the Ryeand
it appeals to all of my unintelligible angst. Another favorite is “The
Scripture Read Backward” originally written in Bengali by Parashuram. It
ironically inverts the India-Britain post-colonial power structure, lending
India the upper hand.

After reading this story, my
respect for translators skyrocketed. To be honest, I hadn’t put much thought
into the process until then. A translator is tasked with capturing the language
and the subtle meanings. They must
retain the author’s nuances. Even something as straightforward as alliteration
proves difficult. Furthermore, you must have a decent mastery of the culture
and history behind the text you’re translating. Sukanta Chaudhuri, the
translator of Parashuram’s work, had to have a working knowledge of what
colonial dynamics were like in order to catch Parashuram’s idiosyncratic jabs
at Britain.

Admittedly, there are stories in
the collection that I’m not crazy about. One complaint I have is that the
majority of the stories hint at oppression in some form. Of course, oppression
happens in all nations, including our own; however, when you’re dealing with an
anthology intent on increasing access to foreign works, and most of those works
have a subjugation theme, you run the risk of associating foreign nations with
subjugation—at the expense of other wonderful cultural happenings in that nation.
Still, this is a small taste of the many works that WWB provides us and their mission to alter the one-way translation
street is laudable overall.

As such, I give Words Without Borders: The World through the
Eyes of Writers 4 out of 5 camel humps. The immense respect between
authors is beautiful to witness. Writers we know and love, like José Saramago, go to bat for their beloved non-English
works, and we listen to them and learn from them. Reading the collection made
me feel like I’d cleansed my Westernized mind… and feel less guilty about
forgetting all of the Spanish I learned in high school. To get that same
feeling, I recommend you at least check out WWB’s
site!

* Schnee, Mason, and Felman, eds. Words Without Borders: The World through the Eyes of Writers. New
York: Anchor Books, 2007. Print.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Let’s get one thing straight: the
actions/thoughts of a character are distinguishable from the actions/thoughts
of the author who created that character. Perhaps Freud would disagree, but I
don’t believe that every writer necessarily gravitates towards stories
populated by a bunch of mini-mes. Readers too hung up on Humbert Humbert’s
perversion as an extension of Nabokov himself totally miss out on the
incredible prose of Lolita. People have
imaginations. Artists like to use them.

For the most part, the men and
women of 1899 begged to differ. When Kate Chopin published The Awakening*, people simply could not deal. A book about a woman, Edna Pontellier, who
*awakens* to the notion that she is no one’s possession—not her husband’s, not
her children’s, not even her lover’s? God forbid. A book about a woman who
realizes her own humanity and acknowledges that sometimes being a human means
feeling a little capricious? Thanks, but no thanks. Her Victorian peers could
not get past Chopin’s explosion of gender norms, so they shunned both Chopin
and her book.

So, what about readers in this day
and age, over a hundred years later? They’re certainly less shocked by female
infidelity, but some are still not that impressed. Complaints I’ve heard
usually revolve around the fact that Edna isn’t unlikable because she values
her independence; she’s unlikeable because she values her independence over everything else. Edna is a mother
of two when she experiences her psychological rebirth and she’s fairly candid
as to how she sees herself in relation to them. She says, “I would give up the
nonessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but
I wouldn’t give myself” (Chopin, 62). She doesn’t hate her kids. Rather, she
becomes conscious of the fact that motherhood is only a portion of her
identity. The veil of blind contentment is lifted and her socially
appropriated role can no longer contain her expanded identity.

I understand that Edna does not react
to her awakening in a totally reasonable, moral way. But would we really expect
her to—in a time still twenty years shy of women being able to vote? Her
emotions have been tempered and her opinions have been ignored for so long that
they are bound to erupt in the opposite direction. She might come across as immature and selfish
but up to that point she has lived her life in a completely selfless way,
sacrificing her own desires and needs—her essential self-- for her husband and
children. Maybe cut her a little bit of slack?

I never thought of Edna as an
asshole, but I did think Kerouac was one. I watched him gallivant around in On the Road, encouraging and enabling his friend Dean to
eschew his responsibilities as a father. Maybe Edna’s decision to start doing
whatever she wanted to do, even if it wasn’t beneficial to her children, is
easier for me to digest because she’s a fictional character. Edna is a symbol
for the liberation of women and an important milestone in feminist writing;
Dean Moriarity is an actual man (Neal Cassady) who in real-life treated his
kids and his (many) women in atrocious ways. Maybe I justify Edna but not Jack and his gang because Kerouac’s writing skills
disappointed me whereas Chopin strung beautiful sentences together like it
ain’t no thang. One of my favorite sentences in all of literature belongs to
her and speaks of Edna—“He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is,
he could not see that she was become herself and daily casting aside that
fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the
world” (Chopin, 75). What an absolutely beautiful way of portraying Mr.
Pontellier’s limited perspective and Edna’s multilayered, enlivening persona.

Indeed, Chopin’s novel is ahead of her time in content
and in scope. Her use of the sea as a symbol of Edna’s endless possibilities is
effective. It also adds to the novel’s sensual undercurrent, if you will.
Describing Edna, she says, “the very passions themselves were aroused within
her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid
body” (Chopin, 34). Chopin is not overtly sexual, rather she seamlessly
intertwines sensuality in her work, as when she writes, “…the same glance
which had penetrated to the sleeping places of her soul and awakened them” (Chopin,
131).

Overall,
I think that The Awakening is a
significant book for men and women alike and it deserves 5 out of 5 camel
humps. When you read it, ask yourself how you feel about Edna. Are you
inspired by her renewed sense of wonder or are you put off by how she redefines
the concept of a caregiver? Should she have to attend to others if she’s not
allowed to attend to herself? These questions are ultimately moral dilemmas
that are relevant to today’s society as well. Consider how your response to Edna
might reflect your own expectations of women and how those expectations shape the social-equality landscape today.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

The first
rule of reading this book blog is that you tell everyone you know about it. The
second rule of reading this book blog is that you tell everyone you know about
it.

Sound
familiar? I know that it’s Fight Club*
and we’re not supposed to discuss it, but this is a group hell-bent on defying
the rules so I think they’ll honor an exception. If you’ve been living in a
hole and haven’t read Chuck Palahniuk’s debut novel or seen David Fincher’s 1999
film, here’s a brief rundown for you without giving anything major away:

A run-of-the-mill man (unnamed
narrator--Edward Norton) encounters a charismatic man (Tyler Durden--Brad Pitt)
who offers him a new perspective on life. Both men are caught in a love
triangle with an unstable, adventurous woman (Marla Singer--Helena Bonham Carter). The unnamed man feels dissatisfied despite
the fact that he’s accumulated a near-perfect furniture set in his apartment.
And don’t even get him started on his refrigerator! He’s “collected shelves
full of different mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There
were fourteen different flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of
capers” (Palahniuk, 45). But he’s treading water. He’s experiencing life in
such a dull, zombified way that he actually craves death as an event that would
liberate him. Tyler swoops in just in time as his deliverance. He doesn’t come
bearing Buddha’s recommendation to strip yourself of your possessions and
discard your mustard collection in order to reach nirvana. Instead, he insists
on total anarchy. Destroy everything in the current system and rebuild! Society
has devolved such that everyone is a slave to their job and their bank accounts just so that they can make a bunch of money to buy shit that they don’t need. Maybe the
only way to truly feel alive is to take back our own dominance and dignity by
emancipating ourselves from the institutions that control us and abolishing the
rulebooks of our generation.

So, Tyler gives the narrator a new
set of rules in the form of Fight Club. Men come together, rip off their
shirts, and beat the living daylights out of each other. A microcosm for how
Tyler thinks we should be reacting to our present fates and a chance to taste
the sweetness of death so that the fighter might really live. When Fight Club
stops fully scratching the morbid fascination itch, he ups the salvation ante
with Project Mayhem—an organization designed to wreak havoc on the world. He
states, “the goal [is] to teach each man in the project that he [has] the power
to control history” (Palahniuk, 122).

Project Mayhem geeks me out. Members tag cars with “Drunk Drivers Against Mothers” bumper stickers (Palahniuk, 144). Tyler leaves the following note: “I have passed an amount of urine into at least one of
your many elegant fragrances” next to a table holding a hundred perfume bottles
that belong to some rich prick (Palahniuk, 82). And indeed, the novel
and the film are very funny, even while brutally preoccupied with mortality.
After all, it’s a satirical work and Palahniuk is as comically inventive as he
is candidly dark. What started out as just a seven-page short story unfurled
into a two hundred-page masterpiece that leaves you laughing, angry, disturbed,
and depressed.

Fight
Club takes the sentiments of Office
Space and hands them to a deranged insomniac. We’re somewhat accustomed to the
representation of this kind of daring and disastrous defiance of conventions in
film today, but audiences were less prepared back in 1999. Many reviewers balked
at the film, which rarely deviates from the text and more often than not uses direct
quotes. The impassioned, polarized responses matched the intensity of the
message in the film, with some viewers concerned by its potential promotion of
violence. But the enormous cultural impact eventually overshadowed the film’s
box-office disappointment. It’s a cult classic that struck a nerve with many
Americans steeped in consumerism and frustration.

I watched the movie prior to reading the book. When I first saw it, I loved it because I was 18—I didn’t know
anything about anything and Fight Club posed some edgy questions that appealed to my desire to be *different*. I had zero reason
to feel deeply dissatisfied with the current order, but I admired the film
because it was raw, in-your-face, and incredibly entertaining. I still think
those things, but now I appreciate the satire. The book and the movie are so
similar in execution that they’re practically inseparable in my mind. They both
provoke an urgency to confront an important issue: you are definitely going to
die, so how are you going to live? Not to mention the impeccable casting.
Edward Norton perfectly resembles the punk ass bitch you imagine the narrator
to be, Brad Pitt is an obvious idealized version of manhood and strength, and
Helena Bonham Carter is, as always, believable in her quirky sensuality. In
fact, Palahniuk insists that the novel is a romance.

I’m sure that the book + film are
upsetting to some, but if life isn’t always rainbows and Chili’s, then our
media shouldn’t be either. I respect Chuck Palahniuk for not backing down at
all in the narrator’s quest to control his own life and redefine the concepts of
completeness and perfection. It doesn’t hurt that there’s a disturbing twist
and a constant thread of dark comedy. As such, Fight Club (the novel and the movie) each receive 5 out of 5
camel humps.

Search This Blog

Lyndsay West

About Me

I’m a 25 year old lover of reading and writing. I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, and I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2013. Currently, I live in New York City making my writing mark on the world via freelance work. Other interests include religious studies, philosophy, psychology, dancing, and live music.

Follow my twitter: @humpdayhardback

*Words underlined/highlighted in red are links to websites with more info on the topic.